This blog is to encorporate discussions on Lost Continents, Catastrophism, The origin of Modern Humans and the Out of Africa theory, Genetics and Human Diversity, The Origin and Spread of Civilization and Cultural Diffusion across the face of the Globe.

Deluge of Atlantis

Deluge of Atlantis

Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Dwarf Cassowary, Casuarius bennetti, also known as the Bennett's Cassowary, Little Cassowary, Mountain Cassowary, or Mooruk, is the smallest of the three species of cassowaries The scientific name commemorates the Australian naturalist George Bennett. He was the first scientist to examine these birds after a few were brought to Australia aboard a ship. Recognising them as representing a new species of cassowary, he sent specimens back to England where this was confirmed. On the west side of Geelvink Bay, western Irian, there exist a distinctive form that may merit a split. C. papuanus is the tentative name. Finally there are no officially recognized sub-species, however, some authors believe there should be.

The Karam of the New Guinea Highlands identify bats and flying birds as one classification (yaket), and the Dwarf Cassowary, an extremely large wingless, flightless bird as another classification (kobtiy). Whereas yaket are bony with wings and fly in the air, kobtiy are bony without wings and are terrestrial and of the forest. Kobtiy are different from other bony wingless animals in that the kobtiy are not quadrupedal, like dogs and lizards, and are not limbless, like snakes.John Gould first identified the Dwarf Cassowary from a specimen from New Britain, in 1857

Male and Female Dwarf Cassowaries, Males are
About three feet tall, females are larger, up to 4 1/2 feet.

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DescriptionIt is a large, at between 99 to 135 cm (3.2 to 4.4 ft) tall and 18 kilograms (39.7 lb), flightless bird with hard and stiff black plumage, a low triangular casque, pink cheek and red patches of skin on its blue neck. The feet are large and powerful, equipped with dagger-like claws on the inner toe. Both sexes are similar. Females have longer casques, brighter bare skin color and are larger in size.Range and habitat: The Dwarf Cassowary is distributed throughout mountain forests of New Guinea, New Britain and Yapen Island, at elevations up to 3300 m (10,826.8 ft). In areas without other species of cassowaries, it will live in the lowlands also. Its diet consists mainly of fallen fruits and small animals, and insects. A solitary bird, it pairs only in breeding season Conservation Due to ongoing habitat loss, habitat degradation, being hunted for food, and often being kept in captivity, the Dwarf Cassowary is evaluated as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, with an occurrence range of 258000 km² (99,614.4 sq mi).External linksBirdLife Species Factsheet

The range of Dwarf Cassowaries is particularly discontinuous and for that reason there should be A) more subspecies allowed due to the peculiar distribution, or B) an allowance made that the natives must have shipped them off to widely-spaced islands at differernt times. The dwarf cassowaries are at home in the mountain ranges down the middle of New Guinea but they are also found at different islands North of New Guinea at the middle and at both the East and West ends of the islands, and at the time of discovery individuals were found in Northern Auistralia and in the Philippines. Karl Shuker in his book The BeastsThat Hide From Men notes the odd distribution and says that Natives must have shipped them around as domesticated or semi-domesticated animals in earlier times, and that odd out-of-place big birds have been represented historically at Angkor Wat and in Indonesia (Java and Borneo) Prior to his statement I was considering that several reports of dwarf cassowaries further to the East in Melanesia might count as unknown animals, but it seems that all instances relate to the same cause. I believe that they are mostly called bu the same or similar names, since "Mooru" sounds about like "Moa"

Several of the internet descriptions of the dwarfed cassowaries emphasize their tame nature in regards to human habitations, saying that they will enter houses and move about in them as if they are quite accoustomed to do so.One site describes their flesh being used in ceremonies in exactly the same manner as they treat their pigs. And one of the sites describing the problems in conservation for the species says that although foreigners are not permitted to take the birds out of the country any more, the natives are allowed to hunt them and kill them with impunity. "The Natives here just treat them like big chickens" the author complains.

That is probably more literally true than the author meant to say, or at least it was more true in the past. Among the varieties of animals domesticated in the Lemurian realm (which includes the Indian elephant and Water buffalo), we must also include their "Big Chickens", the small cassowaries which they managed to transport over thousands of miles of sea in their boats.

Friday, October 28, 2011

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A standard overview on Jade as found on many internet souces runs generally like this:The English term jade gets its meaning from the Spanish term “piedra da ijada”, or loin stone. The name originally came from its famous reputation for curing ailments of the kidneys and loins. In prehistoric times, this stone was used for weapons and tools because of its hardness and density. Archeologists have found a number of tools that were created from jadeite, which is a harder variety of two different types of jade stone. The ancient Chinese revered jade as the “Stone of Heaven”. To them, it was priceless object that provided protection and could turn mortals into immortals.It was not until the 15th century that Europeans began to take interest in jade as a precious stone. Aside from china, it was also found in the Americas and became graded as a valuable gem. People began to wear jade stone on their jewelry. Aside from their symbolizations, a green jade ring also represented wealth because it was quite rare to obtain. A French professor in the 19th century discovered later that jade could be categorized into two different stones, nephrite and jadeite. Since then, jadeite and nephrite sources have been discovered all over the world from Asia to Europe to America.Nephrite rings have a creamy white color known as ‘mutton fat’ in Chinese. It can also come in a variety of green colors. This kind of jade was mostly used before the 1800s in China as well as New Zealand and the Atlantic Coasts and Pacific Coasts. Canada holds one of the largest amounts of nephrite, although it can also be found in other areas.Jadeite was available in many more color variations, including lavender, mauve, blue, pink and a variety of emerald green colors. Jadeite is much more rare compared to nephrite and can only be found in twelve places on earth. Translucent green emerald jadeite is the most prized type, both historically and in modern times. Quetzal jade is a bright green stone from Guatemala that was treasured by the Mesoamerican cultures and still held in high value today. Guatemala and Burma are the primary sources for modern jadeite.

Of especial interest is the fact that the nephrite jade was especially favoured on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the Americas.The main type of jade used in Mesoamerica is the true jadeite. This is unusual and it may be inferred archaeologically that outsiders familiar with making the nephrite jade groundstone axheads (celts) and other objects came into the area and adapted their techniques to using jadeite. The jadeite was traded as far away as the southern United States and out to the West Indies, which is one sure sign of the extent that the Mesoamericans were able to influence directly. However, in Neolithic Europe and along the Atlantic coasts of the Americas, the jade in use was the nephrite jade and it was used in the same way: primarily as these celts or as Tomahawk heads. This was especially true in areas such as the Arawak West Indies and in Megalithic Europe. In both of these cases the actual point of origin for the nephrite used is still unknown although there are known sources for the nephrite outside of those areas.

Here is my generalised map to indicate jade use and jade trade from ancient times up into recorded history. The first partially-ground celts are indicated in the Saharan region during what is called the Middle stone age there-corresponding to the Neanderthal age in Europe. (olive on the map)These are old indeed but then they are almost never of jade stones nor are they ground smooth overall. Some examples can be 40 or 50 thousand years old and they are assigned to the Aterian culture. At some point the concept of partially-ground chopping tools spread to Southeast Asia and then to Australia, where they are once again older than anywhere else, perhaps 25 to 30 thousand years old (The Times Atlas of World History, Cambridge Encyclopedia ofArchaeology) (medium green on the map)And then something happened locally in Southern Spain, indicated by black on the map. According to M.Whishaw, Southern Spain did not go through a conventional Upper Paleolithic period but instead went straight into using ground stone and slate: there are greenstone celts there older than anywhere else in Europe (Atlantis in Andalucia)

There is some indication that large sections of the Mid-Atlantic ridge area about the Azores plateau region contains large amounts of serpenised minerals (false jade) and also Nephrite: in effect, whole mountains of jade down there. Since Donnelly's book on Atlantis came out in 1881, it has been widely known that there are no sources known for the European Neolithic nephrite groundstone axheads (celts) and subsequently there still are not any known sources for most of the locations. Sources have been found subsequently in Poland and loose boulders of the material (not the sources) found in parts of the Balkans and in the Alps, but this does not account for the bulk of Megalithic Europe, the Canary Islands or the islands of the Mediterranean, or North Africa.That is the more important area as far as traces of Atlantis are concerned, and some of the finds are chemically different from the known Continental sources also.
[see for example:http://www.lostcity.washington.edu/science/geology/rocksofatlantismassif.htmlhttp://www.ifremer.fr/serpentine/english/scientific-sheet-8.htmhttp://geology.gsapubs.org/content/38/10/959.fullhttp://www.empr.gov.bc.ca/Mining/Geoscience/MineralDepositProfiles/ListbyDepositGroup/Pages/QGemsSemipreciousStones.aspxwww.cas.muohio.edu/~rakovajf/​WTTW%20Greenstone.pdfQuote: Metamorphic greenstones also comprise, to varying degrees, large rock sequences of Precambrian age (Archaean through Proterozoic) that are called greenstone belts. Such belts also include metamorphosed sedimentary rocks and are most often associated with granites and gneisses. It is generally agreed that these assemblages formed at ancient plate boundaries including oceanic spreading zones, such as today's Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and island arcs, such as the Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific (De Wit and Ash- wal 1997). ]
So basically my idea is that nephrite jade groundstone greenstone celts are an atlantean invention and sent out as trade items to other areas during the last days of the Pleistocene, and haneded down as keepsakes after that.
On the map the enclosed darker green areas are generally where nephrite celts have been found, and usually they are Holocene in date (after 10000 years ago): some of the outlying areas are subsequent centers developing as satellites. One of my informants states that there are greenstone celts found at the mouths of the Meikong and looking much the same as any other ones.Smetime at around the beginning of the Holocene, celts were introduced along with microliths into Southern Russia, Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan and then into India. Shortly after that the idea spread through Southeast Asia and as far as New Guinea. However in the regions farther eastward there was already the tradition of setting the groundstone cutting tools crosswise to the hafting as axes and adzes were more usually used (Both axes and adzes remained in use in the area as in the whole world over, but in Southeast Asia and the Pacific adzes were more popular. Their diffusion over the early holocene is easily traced by a succession of new styles)

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Oceanic Axes

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By 7000-8000 years ago, groundstone nephrite jadeworking was introduced into China and began their Neolithic. Only something happened at the time: the Chinese fell in love with it and began to shape it in new ways that had not been thought of before. It had become a highly prized and valued item.
I imagine that this must have followed an earlier process further south and China was lagging a little behind the more important cultural center of Sundaland, where the religious revernce for jade and the fondness of using it as an artistic medium would have seized hold earlier, in the late Pleistocene. There is some evidence of some direct diffusion of some of the same ideas taking hold in Atlantis at the time, such as cranial deformation, coming into Sundaland by way of the Near East and even passing beyond into Australia: and somewhere somehow along the way, Atlantis seems to have acquired a taste for such Lemurian food items as coconuts and bananas.
But the lighter green areas indicate the diffusion of the Oriental fondness for nephrite jade, eventually to include New Zealand, where some forms strikingly like the Chinese Neolithic ones were established very much later on.

In the New World, something very similar happened among the Olmecs and then the later Mayas and others, and there is some direct evidence that these ideas were brought over from China. However, in Mesoamerica the jade available is actually jadeite and a different mineral. spread of jadeite trade goods in the New World is easily noted:We also know definitely jadeite would not be known for thousands of years in China and that when the Chinese did finally learn of it, it came from Burma. So none of the Olmec jade ever made it back to China, even if China WAS the source for the way the Olmecs revered and used their own special kind of jade (Some early jade celts are known to be marked with readable Chinese writing on them, from before 1000 BC: I do not know what kind of jade was involved in this case)

They made odd little deity figurines that were mixtures of human, fish or frog features out of the jade and that was also something significant, because several of the older Goddess figurines from Europe and especially the Mediterranean region had similar mixtures of human and fish or frog features. A famous example would be the "Fish Gods" at Lepenski Vir in what used to be Yugoslavia.

In the West Indies are similar small fetishes or idols belonging to the Arawak cultures and called Zemis. Some of them are like whales carrying islands on their backs with human faces, only the islands could be volcanic cones, some of them were mummies and some were oddcombinations of "Hammerstones" with human features. Similar sculptures are found on the Canary Islands (only not so varied) and Lewis Spence considers these tradtional forms of stone zemis to be a definite indicator for what he calls the Atlantean Culture Complex (Atlantis In America and in other sources)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zemi

One of the origins for zemis is shown in several Olmec jades which are actually celts that have also become elaborated into human figures. Often there is only a mask caeved onto the jade blade, but the depictions can also sometimes be elaborate. Some examples also occur in Europe but more importantly, the same stylizations occur on full-sized megalithic stones turning them into statues also.

Mayan Celt

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Neolithic Europe. Red Dots are Individual Pottery finds

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Neolithic British Arrowheads, very like their North American Contemporaries

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European Neolithic Cordmarked pot, Atlantis-City Plan Design

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European Neolithic Settlement, also typically
a concentrically walled and moated structure

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British Neolithic Nephrite Celt, virtually identical to the ones across the Atlantic and
called "Petaloid" celts. Once again, no known source for the mineral on the British Isles.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/50/19745.full
Map of jade trade after 3000 BC: it is noted in the article that earlier trade in nephrite jade items is indicated in the dispersal of beads through the Philippines (and probably as far as Borneo) during the neolithic period.

This looks to be a trade network started when Sundaland was up because of the area indicated-in Sundaland, the green area would mostly have been an inland sea with the outlet betwween Taiwan and Luzon.
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Nephrite Jade Beads

﻿ Nephrite is the commoner of the minerals known as jade and it is the kind of jade most commonly used in China up until the Ming Dynasty, when Jadeite began to be imported from Burma. Nephrite is also a general term and denotes more than one kind of mineral, but there are only two places in the world where jadeite is consistently used-Burma and in MesoAmerica. This means that if Chinese mariners ever made it to Olmec territories and inoculated the locals with a fancy for jade, the Mesoamerican jadeite never got sent back to China by way of a reply. Which is possible but seems a little odd on the face of it. Chinese prospectors allegdly did know and explore large deposits of Jade in Alaska and Western Canada, according to Henrietta Mertz in Pale Ink.

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Raw Mineral Nephrite

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Jade Ring

﻿ The fascination that the Chinese had for (Nephrite) Jade goes back a long way because recently we have found that the oldest levels of the Neolithic in China are just loaded with tons of jade carvings in basically a number of variations of a few basic forms. These forms go back to just before 5500 BC (Global Superflood 3) but just at about 5500 BC there was a significant radiation of the jade-use and the carving-pattern templates that seems to center on the island of Taiwan and from there spread both inland and Northward into China and then again Southward into Indonesia and even to New Guinea.
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"Coiled Dragon"

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"Tiger Claw" protective charm pendant

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The thing is that many of the same forms and variations eventually turn up in New Zealand, which was supposedly not inhabited until thousands of years later. And yet the New Zealand Maori are one of the natable examples of native peoples that venerated nephrite jade ("Greenstone" commonly in English) and call it a "Treasure" which is actually unlawful (taboo) for unworthy persons to own or handle. Special people go to find the raw jade material and they are supposed to prepare themselves with ritual purification, and only certain other special people are allowed to carve the jade or eventually wear it.

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Old depiction of Maori Jades. Note: includes
a couple of twist-horned antilopes at bottom

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There is a direct comparbility of many of the traditional Maori forms of jade carvings, their symbols and their meanings, to the early Chinese Neolithic of about 5000-6000 BC. This is also about the same level where the Chinese Neolithic pottery resembles the pottery of the Lapita people, which included the ancestors of the polynesians. Some of the jade carvings comparable to the Chinese ones have been uncovered in New Guinea, and they run back to 5000 BC there as well. I believe we are looking at the range of jade carving forms and the attached symbolism that comes from Sundaland, and that it became attached to Mainland China and New Guinea about the time of Global Superflood 3. Some of the traditional forms and meanings were passed down to the New Zealand Maori marked as "Treasure"-probably actual jade carving originals were handed down through the millenia as models, but in both New Guinea and New Zealand some of the forms are also passed down in the traditional forms of woodcarvings.

There is little or no likelihood that the same forms and meanings would have diffused out of China and into New Zealand more recently because the Chinese jade industry developed far beyond that point later.

Maori Tiger Claw (Called a "Leaf")

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Maori Jade Sea Turtle

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Hongshan Turtleshell, Plastron (Bottom)

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Hongshan Jade Turtleshell, Carapace (Top)

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'S' Shaped Dragon-Poss. inspired by seahorse's shape?

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Maori 'S' Shaped Dragon (Manaia)

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Hongshan Neolithic Chinese Manaia

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Hongshan Chinese Neolithic Tikis

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Maori Hei Tiki

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Hongshan Chinese Neolithic Tiki

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Mere, Maori Nephrite edged club

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Chinese Mere or "Hand Ax"

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New Guinea mere , from Ebay

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Changes in male Chinese skulls since the Neolithic. Actually the Neolithic skulls looked more like Polynesians than the more modern chinese do, and this includes a "Rocker Jaw" that completely disappeared in more modern times. The earlier skulls more resembled the Upper Cave skulls at Zhokoudian ("Peking Man") where the adult male had more "White" features (meaning more like European Cro-Magnons), one of the female skulls was like a "Melanesian" and the other female skull was "Eskimoid" (ie, Arctic Mongoloid) according to Weidenrich and the excavators. That sort of a mix makes sense as a "Lemurian" melange, given that the Arctic Mongoloids were only just coming down into China at the time and the "Melanesians" were the normal inhabitants of Southeast Asia and Indonesia at the time-as well as being the Melanesians' ancestors in the islands and carriers of the Lapita ware culture.﻿

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

﻿ Ever heard about turtles haunting a human burial site? Well, that is exactly what archaeologists have unearthed, but not so literally. In an ancient human cemetery in Vanuatu, researchers have discovered the remains of giant horned turtles. For almost two centuries, the first settlers in a Pacific island lived along with these turtles. Moreover, they found out that these settlers butchered and feasted on them. Subsequently, they put the remains and bones on their antecedents’ graves.
This research was conducted by palaeontologists Dr. Trevor Worthy and Dr. Arthur White, from the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences. A host of archaeologists from the Australian National University also assisted in uncovering this bizarre turtle bone bed.
These land-dwelling reptiles are known as meiolaniid turtles. Fossils around millions of years old were discovered in Australia and Argentina. However, researchers have been able to understand them better by the bones found at Lord Howe Island, which are tens of thousands of years old.
“It is the first time this family of turtles has been shown to have met with humans and there are many turtle bones in the middens,” asserted Dr White. “Initial excavations in 2004 by the ANU team revealed that the first use of the site was as a cemetery and provided the first real opportunity in more than 50 years of research to describe a group of Lapita people and glean insights into their ritual and mortuary practices.”
The bones found in the graveyard belonged to land-dwelling turtles had heads adorned with multiple horn and large knobby tails. It was because of this that they could not retract back into their enormous armored shells. The species discovered at Vanuatu is said to be new for the animal world of science. The bones are found to be the most recent known remains of this unfathomable family.
The human cemetery is at Teouma situated on the south coast of Efate Island in Central Vanuatu. The burial site houses the remains of the Lapita people. These people are the foremost colonizers from eastern Polynesia and Melanesia and were famous for their decorated earthenware pottery. Previously, this place was alongside the sea however due to successive geological events, it is now around 800 meters from the coast.
Middens are the post-Lapita waste dumps, which roughly dates to 2500-2800 years ago. These may have been deposited unintentionally on top of the earlier burials, which dated back to almost 2900-3000 years ago. There were some human bodies which had been beheaded after death, with the heads placed in pots. On the other hand even turtle bodies were headless, mostly the remains consisted of animals’ haunches with some shells.
“This biased skeletal representation suggests butchering at more remote locations, perhaps inland, and transport back to the village,” commented Dr Worthy. “We are hoping the ongoing excavations will find middens from the first settlers and with them there should be more complete turtle remains.”
It is known that prior to the arrival of the humans at Teouma, a bulky stratum of volcanic debris called tephra was deposited over the site. Thus, it created a smooth surface on top of the jagged uplifted reef. 66 burials of more than 85 humans had been reported to be unearthed from their shallow graves. These graves had been dug in places where the tephra had previously sealed gaps in the reef.
Subsequently, the site might have lost its cultural significance since it was turned into a village dump on top of the graves. Villagers probably abandoned the settlement due to its distance from the sea. It showed no signs of inhabitance till a coconut plantation was established on the site around a century back.
The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Archeology / History.

These giant horned chelonians were of a very ancient breed and were functionally much the same as Ankylosaurs. Some of them even had tail-clubs. They lived in Australia during the Pleistocene and evidently colonised the islands of Melanesia by way of New Guinea. Prior to this date, their remains in Postglacial strata have been identified in some smaller islands to the south and offshore from Australia: it now seems they mustve been still fairly widespread at the time the humans entered the islands. The Lapita Ware peoples were the ancestors of the Melanesians and forerunners of the Polynesians: we are definitely talking indications of the original Lemurian (Sundaland) expansion into the area. And the way the chelonians's remains were treated-buried in human cemeteries and ceremonially beheaded even as the humans were- bespeaks a religious reverence of some sort. I would not be surprised if the early Islanders had not shipped them from island to island when they were smaller and easily transported: I would be delighted if some survived to the present day and were being reported as Cryptids.

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